Eleven Names

This Blog Is About Political Correctness

2009-07-08T14:30:00.004-04:00

Yeah, this one is really, really old in internet terms (I first wrote part of this on May 20th.) and am coming back to it now as a way to get something out soon, because I'm lost inside my own head around the death of Iain Steele and the community's response to it. His death is tragic, but the reaction to it, I think, is going to continue that cycle of tragedy and really, all that's gonna happen is a sad cycle of emasculating males for admitting they have feelings.

And that's (along with depression) what made it easy to pick on Iain Steele and the major contributing factor to Iain's suicide. So, instead, this one is about being politically correct and people who don't recognize their own privilege.

So I've been on the internet today, reading and synthesizing, trying to figure out what I want to do and I ended up on Kotaku's not-forum Talk Amongst Yourselves and kind of predictably, I ended up talking about Resident Evil 5, N'Gai Croal and racism. That, and oddly enough, political correctness.

I've had a lot of interactions with that epithet, most of it aimed at me. Majority of the time, it's by other people who are white males saying "You're too much of a buzzkill." Or, "you're thinking too much". I hate that last one especially. Really, it's one of the few things I actively dislike. (I passively dislike much of this planet.) Sometimes, it's called for, I think. Most of the time, though, it isn't. I'm not thinking too much, you're not thinking enough, I think.

The comment that got me was "political correctness is becoming a tumour, it stifles creative licence and frowns at the outlandish, Housewives of America need to get a life and the people who jump on the racism band wagon at any available chance need to wake up and smell the bacon."

I think he's wrong. Political correctness is not a tumor, it's one of the few things that gives me hope about our society. Political correctness is a start to a wider recognition that not everyone comes from the same perspective. I think he's missed the point. The point is not to stifle creativity but instead to try to speak in a way that doesn't passively disenfranchise whole groups of people not being "normal". I've given it some thought and I have decided that I'm not sorry, not one bit, for, in Jay Smooth's words, making people think about how their words affect people.

And I don't know if the person believes that having to respect other people's perspectives and lives is so incredibly difficult that it's easier just to assume they "don't mean it like that", but like the wise man said, in any healthy relationship, the closer you get, the more you know and respect other people's boundaries and that's what being politically correct is.

Political correctness is about showing respect and humility towards people with a different history than you. From what I understand, political correctness is supposed to be about respecting the humanity of people who aren't like you. Political correctness, so far as I can tell, is supposed to be about understanding how we affect each other and caring more about how that happens, not as a euphemism for smarminess and insincerity.

I guess I've got a fondness for different perspectives. One of the first songs I geeked out to had a chorus that said no one will ever be like me and six years later, I found that chorus again in a hip-hop song and it brought me back to punk rock and now, I see it again in an argument on the internet. Everyone's perspective is unique. That doesn't mean each perspective is meaningfully different, but that there is more than one overarching one is one of the points of political correctness and being careful with one's language.

Respect isn't dead, but there sure are people who want to shoot it in the head.

Leave the Money on the Table

2009-07-01T17:15:00.000-04:00

The only way Meghan Daum could miss the point more is if she was Shaquille O'Neal at the free throw line.

I don't often start out these things with personal attacks, but sometimes I read something to inane and so wrong, I feel compelled, by volume and depth of my vitriol to respond. Today's case is Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum, writing about J.D. Salinger's attempts to block the U.S. publishing of an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye by a European resident called J.D. California via a lawsuit.

She sees this as "delusional", "over-protective" and "paranoid". I view it as "protecting one's intellectual property" and "not wanting shitty fan-fiction from the author of The Macho Man's (Bad) Joke Book and The 100 Best and Absolute Greatest Heavy Metal Bands in the World pubished".

She also calls J.D. Salinger "mercurial" and she might be right, but this isn't evidence of it. He's refused derivations (of all forms) of his books, including when the BBC wanted to do a stage adaptation, when Hollywood and everyone else came calling, so as the owner of the intellectual property that is Holden Caufield, it's not mercurial in the least for him to say no to someone else, who does not appear to be a serious author, using his character and the world that character inhaibts to tell a story.

Ms. Daum is correct in pointing out that Mr. California's book isn't going to do a lot of damage, but the point is that Mr. California never had and never will have the permission to write anything in the Catcher in the Rye universe or using the Catcher in the Rye characters and my guess is Mr. Salinger wants to assert that right while he's still alive. The point is not that "people wouldn't have heard of J.D. California's book before Salinger's lawsuit" but that J.D. California doesn't have the right to use the characters and make money off of them. The point is that, yes, it is easier to acquiese, but Salinger doesn't have to and he's within his bounds legally and morally to say no to an adaptation or an offer to flesh out the universe he has keys to.

Most striking, however, is that Ms. Daum returns to talking about Salinger's refusal to play along in terms of public relations, that it's bad, vaguely, for his image and she's right, but what she doesn't recognize is that Salinger doesn't care. He doesn't want the fame. He doesn't want the money. He doesn't want the attention. My guess is that it's baffling to a person who works in Los Angeles, a place where the economy and culture are based on fame, money and attention that someone would refuse the offer for more.

It seems like Daum doesn't understand that just because it's easier doesn't mean one ought to go along with it. Yes, Salinger is standing on principle here, but more than that, Salinger wants to choose how to define his universe, which is incredibly restricting, but the point, I believe, Salinger is making is that his works aren't for anyone else's to play with and it's not up for sale or discussion.

Salinger doesn't want reporters at his house. He doesn't want interviews. He doesn't want to play the game, so he dropped out of it when he wanted to, on his terms. It's odd, certainly and it's not what a lot of other authors do, but that doesn't make him paranoid, delusional or mercurial.

It makes him different. No wonder Meghan Daum doesn't get it.

Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Garish Newspaper Headlines

2009-06-30T17:24:00.000-04:00

The title is a play on a Propaghandi record called Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes. As a statement, it's so vivid that it makes me want to get it tattooed on me somewhere despite finding the band that penned the disc almost hopelessly sanctimonious.

I'm not excited by the media frenzy around the death of Michael Jackson. The biggest dent he made in my life was New Found Glory saying Thriller was their favorite song. For some people, his death is huge, the end of an era in American music. It's the end of an era, for some newspapers and people. The response to his death from my politically minded friends (well, one in particular) was "Why are you talking about Michael Jackson's death, there's tons of other death and violence out there that's less fashionable and newsworthy that deserves your attention."

She's right, but ultimately, what does a Twitter update or Facebook update regarding Michael Jackson mean? Twitter and Facebook updates are not the places for screeds and getting across huge ideas, so I'm willing to let people have their venue, but more than that...Michael Jackson's life deserves a careful examination, since I believe there's an example of American existence in his life.

At a young age, he was forced, with his siblings to go on the road for America's entertainment, became a breakout star, became famous on his own due to that monstrous work ethic that was pounded into him by his father and then something snapped. By the time something snapped, he released some of his best music and had made his stamp on the pop landscape, so that his eccentricities were just cute foibles until they got creepier and creepier.

Neverland Ranch is a pretty obvious statement, for a guy that had his youth stolen to dance in front of other people, this is a man that wanted to be a kid, which isn't so strange and then something finally snapped. It's important to remember that when we're talking about him. Something snapped and he went nuts.

And by the end of his life, he owed lots of money, living in a space that cost him $100,000 a month and died after promising a huge amount of work in the future. Sound like any mation you know, living beyond its means with a negative bank balance?

I don't want to obscure the bad things he did, but this is a person with a tragic arc, who'se life I was only around for the obviously self-destructive parts of. He achieved a level of fame unthinkable today and a fanbase that despite the last 20 years, endures. That fact alone is so complex, I can't begin to unpack it.

And now he's dead.

So, if that death helps you understand or personalize the end of an era, or get a little bit closer to the idea nothing lasts forever, then I view the Twitters, Facebook status updates and MySpace blogs as legitimate and just as worthy as chirps about Tehran. That doesn't mean one ought to pay less attention to the recently cracked down protests in Iran, (it seems the guys behind the guns have won, but at a cost) but that it takes time to process the death of someone who'se importance in pop music is nearly impossible to overlook and a knee-jerk reaction to it is perfectly sensible.

Nicholas Kristof, journalist and small time saint, said in a youtube Op-Ed that Americans don't really care about numbers, but personalize a story and they'll care and that, I think is a useful lens to view the inane Tehran OR Michael Jackson debate (that I must admit I fell into) through. We can have both and more importantly, we ought to have room for both events. We can leave open a space for the riots and murder of kids our age in the streets halfway across the world, but that space doesn't preclude another space for confusion and distress over the death of an artist who'se music was a touchstone for literally millions of people.

I can't visualise a million of anything. Except maybe, maybe grains of sand on a beach. I know that we're all so tiny in the grand scheme of things and we influence different people we are around just by observing it, but hell, it's okay to express sadness and confusion over someone who'se life has affected you. I guess that's the takeaway message from this, that it's okay to feel strongly for someone who doesn't know you.

Yes, This Is About Tehran. No, I Have No Idea What To Do. I Just Don't Want More Kids My Age To Die.

2009-06-21T13:40:00.003-04:00

Despite the fact that much of what you see below this is about the war/crackdown in Tehran and Iran, I'd prefer not to run my mouth about what Iran needs. I'll explain.

Portions of Tehran are burning and people my age are dying for rebelling against a rigged election, standing up, throwing stones and setting fire to cars. I feel helpless to stop it. And it's something I can sweep to the back of my mind. But then I read analysis from David Corn on Mother Jones, a person I otherwise trust, who says that the ruling parties in Iran, a.k.a the rulers keeping kids my age down, are really only going to be unseated by a lot more bloodshed and it might have to come to a full grown war for the government to change. Do I really want to stop it?

Think about that sentence. I mean, hell yeah, I'd like to see less people my age dying. That's usually uniformly a positive. That said, I don't feel like I know enough about the situation there and what it means in the context of Iran as a nation or group of people to feel comfortable speaking. Normally, I'd run my mouth talking about how the government, a group of thugs, held together by an Ayatollah and strong religious faith, is cracking down savagely on people who feel the election was stolen, who put faith in the veneer of democracy and that kind of crackdown is something that's better suited to CIA-backed war criminals than Iran, but that was before I read a book called We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. That said, the government of Iran is showing another one its faces and it is, yes, hideously repressive and murderous.

One of the most disturbing portions of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families was the response of the international community to the crisis. They showed up, not knowing anything and made it demonstrably worse. The UN run refugee camps were places where the pawns and hatchet men in the genocide went and ate the food and drank the same liquids that were running from them were. The international peace-keeping forces had orders that restricted them from getting their countries embroiled in the conflict, so soldiers watched through a fence as more Tutsis were killed in the UN run refugee camp. No one discharged their weapon. They were good soldiers.

I'm not Vulcan, so it's not like I feign exquisite control over my emotions, so when I see videos like these (#9, a video of a wounded girl dying is something I admit I haven't watched yet) they pull at my heartstrings. No. That phrase doesn't seem quite right. Those videos grab me by the shoulders and ask What are you doing about this? and the answer is so far, terribly little. I can talk about it on Twitter, Facebook and other places. But, I'm one tiny person. What can I change? Even if I could change something, what would the results be? Would the results be good for the people in the streets? The actions I take have consequences.

I'm mindful of the fact (or socially transmitted fiction) that support and solidarity for the kids in Tehran is terribly chic now among people my age who are insincere in other aspects of their lives and I'd like to avoid that pretense, if possible. I guess I'm trying to write all this without judgment or invocation of a moral high ground.

And I don't have direct control over shit. It's not like I can call up Obama or a three-star and have boots on the ground in hours. (Plus, we're still at war in Iraq.) The decision is not mine to make. Period. Tt's not like it was ever my decision to make, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it. It's what we make with the decisions we have and the tools we're given. I'm not doomed to watching updates on my Twitter feed.

As weak as the mechanisms of American democracy are, I can still use them. It might not be much of a message, but I have to imagine that a college age kid getting up before 8 a.m. to call a senator or representative's office has to have some effect on whatever intern or office worker is manning the phones. Here is a list of your senators and their phone numbers in D.C. Do what you will with it. Ditto for the House of Representatives.

More than that, I can ask the people in Iran what they want. Apparently, there's a well known (and respected?) blog called Iranian.com. There's directories of Iranian bloggers out there, here's just one directory, plus with Twitter and communication tools, a couple minutes of searching on Google will probably avail you something close to home, emotionally. That said, Twitter isn't always accurate, so beware.

I'm not sure what to tell my Representative or Senator, though. I'm thinking of just asking that they look, a lot harder, at the history of Iran and where and how U.S. assistance would help the kids my age protesting the best. The CIA and Iran have a long, long history together, and most of it is CIA-sponsored coups, because the leader in Iran wasn't pliant enough to U.S. interests, so I'd like to avoid that, if possible. Whatever will help those kids install someone they trust that will foster a robust system that is accoutable to the people of Iran, I'd like to help them with. I just don't know what that is quite yet.

Anyway. My thoughts are with my peers risking their lives, and even though I don't believe in God, if volume of prayers count for anything, here's one more for the kids on the streets.

Allahu Akbar.

Coma Boy

2009-06-15T16:40:00.005-04:00

There are cool updates inbound and skeletons of posts (Left 4 Dead and the fan fallout) to be added onto, but frankly I'm too tired at the moment to work on them.

Here's why:

I got approximately three hours of sleep last night, because I started my volunteer DJ shift on the other side of the city at nine a.m, and needed to get up early so I could a) get coffee, b) buy a tape adapter from Radio Shack ($24, wtf) and c) get there early to figure out how to man the boards. It turned out the hardware wasn't taking with my tape adapter, so I had to do my show the old fashioned way, pick handfuls of CDs at nearly random from the archive, take them back to the station and see what's spinning.

But that was only after frantically putting on songs really chosen at random by the station manager to fill time, which, (of course) were only two and a half minutes long each, still trying to make the tape deck work. Each moment of dead air feels like a minute. But. More music was found. Sadly, much of the music was generic faux-lush indie pop trying to call itself rock that made me sick, intellectually. Henry Rollins would call it weak. Here's how bad it was: I played a 20 minute drone song not written by Sunn 0))) to clear my head. I ended up playing really, really stupid long songs (8-11 minutes) just to eat up time and while that settled in, I had fun. It was very relaxing.

Once the relaxation took effect, I started enjoying the process more and more and getting back to what enjoyed, sharing music, which made everything worth it.

I left the radio station at about 1 and only got back at 3:30, so, even at 11:30 p.m. I'm pretty pooped. Let me tease a possibility.

I have been thinking very seriously about starting a twelve post spree based on Marathon's self-titled disc, taking each song and working on a post that follows, vaguely or carefully, the themes or spirit of the track. Put it this way: With lyrics like I don't ask much/Cause there's not much I can bring/Just hold me 'til we sleep/Please hold me 'til we sleep from a song called "Don't Ask If This Is About You", I'm already looking forward to making more readers uncomfortable.

Mostly though, I'm really, really tired and perhaps I will think better of it when I get up. But! Savor the possibility.

My Bachelor's Won't Earn Half the Debt I've Incurred

2009-06-04T02:10:00.001-04:00

The title comes from, not surprisingly, a Crime In Stereo song called the Bride. It's about that space between college and post-graduate stuff where you're trying to find work with bills to pay and it rings a lot more with me now that I have that bachelor's degree and am trying to find something that will pay me.

Now, though, this is about more.

Zach once said, half jokingly, that I'm kind of important. I'm not. I write, ask people questions and transcribe the answers elsewhere. Occasionally, I google my name and some of my interviews pop up. First is my Twitter feed. Interesting. Second is pastepunk. (What up, brothers?) Oddly enough five pages deep is the blog of a friend of mine, in her initial post that mentions me. Mostly, I like the vouyerism. What work of mine do other people link to? What do they find important? But I'm not important. I'm not sure how many people read or listen.

I ended up playing Left 4 Dead on my own over the weekend (away from home, since I don't own a next-gen console), and leaving aside that I have memories attached to that game, the game frustrated me, not the least of which being my computer controlled teamates are too goddamned stupid to throw a motherfucking pipe bomb (or motherfucking moltov cocktail) when we're being attacked by the zombie horde, meaning, I, was the sole weilder of anything that could take the zombie horde off of us for a moment and had to wait for what I hoped would be the most judicious moment to use said pipe bomb/ass saving device.

Then, another boomer would show up, vomit on someone, calling another round of zombies and we'd be back at square one, this time, without a pipe bomb.

But, when you're playing Left 4 Dead with people, you need to come up with a plan beforehand. Are you going to run through the level as fast as you can on a mad dash for the endpoint? Are you going to take it slow and stick together? Or, something more detailed in between? Then, you have to get people to agree (and stick with) this plan. People on the internet are notoriously finicky, but even when one has those people in the room, there are several different ideas of how to proceed, most of them put forward by me, one of the worst people at the title playing.

(If at this point, you're guessing this is going to relate, closely, to my own life, pat yourself on the back: You're right.)

I've written, for the last three weeks, about feeling stuck and like there were too many options, well, I've begun to narrow them down and nail down a basic framework for action for the foreseeable future in my life.

It came down to a question: Adventure or grad school? I'm relatively young, I've got a couple years to mess around and what to do with a time in my life without a business suit? My parents are perfectly willing to subsidize my housing until I find something permanent, and for that, I am extremely grateful. If the music I listen to has taught me anything, it has taught me to try for the life less ordinary, the road without all the lighting or clear end point.

I presented a quick sketch of my plan for the next couple years of my life to my father, and a good friend of mine, and they both seemed to be okay with it. This summer would be me learning how to drive, this fall/winter would be an internship, somewhere, all the while, learning Japanese, in the vain hope that I could teach English over there come 2010. In case you're wondering, none of this is nailed down. But it's what I want to do.

The opportunity is here, now, to do something real and interesting. It means giving up on a couple things: It means, likely, saying hello to almost exclusively text based communication with my friends in the States and saying goodbye to even the idea of seeing my friends in real life. Speaking through Twitter, Facebook and IM clients. It means a lot of time spent learning a language that I have never even dealt with, a written language that isn't based on letters, but drawing.

But hell. I owe more than is fashionable to my early development to Ronin Warriors, Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing. (I still have the Dragonball Z tshirt from years ago...) Trigun and Cowboy Bebop broke and rebuilt my mind in high school. I've felt closer to JRPGs than most of the people I've ever met. Yes, I know Japan is crazy town. Or at least Tokyo is. There's a saying I was reminded of that the Japanese have: The nail that sticks up is the first one to be hammered. That's what they think of individuals. That kind of a culture is going to be hard to get used to. But isn't that the point of adventures? New experiences. New ideas.

As I told a friend of mine catching up at last night's Trap Them (if you like truly aggressive music in the vein of Entombed or Napalm Death, click the link and buy their full length, Seizures in Barren Praise. $6 for the digital download.) show, what's the point of listening to the music I do if I don't take a grand, glorious chance for something different and unconventional? Live your heart and never follow, right? Be scared. Get uncomfortable.

I keep telling myself I don't want the Dilbert existence. I'm willing to take a chance if it means that I'm on my own and I'm not being measured by some ridiculous standard that I'm constantly behind on. Fuck a computer program and the only variables being in the program code being what I'm measured against. But there's a nagging feeling and it says otherwise. It says:

James, who are you kidding? You've got little to say, nothing to add to a conversation and you made one of the your largest emotional failings your major in college: You think too much and now, you've got a B.A. in it. Your attempts at journalism are middling and your years spent offering criticism in music, video games and politics (domestic and international) are second rate at best.

Let's not forget, your "friends" in punk music, are using you. Period. If you didn't write for pastepunk, do you honestly think they'd email you or IM you out of the blue? Starbucks is hiring. You know someone who works there. Think about it. Cut your hair, comb it and then see about getting a degree that's remotely useful. Buy some ties and white shirts.

Your parents don't even read your blog. That should speak volumes.

After hearing that for a while, the feeling of safety and a steady paycheck is very, very tempting. A man far wiser than I, Jay Smooth, called it the Little Hater, what I'm going to hopefully not butcher and call the voice of doubt and fear in every creative person's mind. It's very reasonable. It makes sense. It's what any normal person ought to do.

Then I remember six words. These six words aren't the same six simple words that comprise Bedard's hosanna in What Makes Us Strong, though they're related, intimately. (I'll explain how if you're really interested.) Those six words are out of step with the world and suddenly, it rushes back to me.

I've only got one life, one chance and getting in step with the Dilberts isn't going to make me happy. Please, understand. Some things can't be unseen and I can't forget what I know, but I'm not cut out for traditional office work. It's not wholly about satisfying that frustrated, scared teenager that first heard Minor Threat through an Archos Jukebox on the southbound train to school, but the culmination of the knowledge that, no, really, I'm different and if I follow that, it'll take me places.

It's late, and I have to get up tomorrow to actually do something. So, while I still have my eyes open, let me end this with another Crime In Stereo lyric:

Oh, Doctor Palmer, what am I to do? This choice is for life and I can't decide...

I Just Remembered Something: You Should Go On.

2009-05-29T00:45:00.002-04:00

The title comes from a song by Face to Face singer, Trever Keith called Cross Your Heart. And now, bed.

I have wondered aloud, for a good six month span starting at the end of last year, often, occasionally in Zach's arms (there's documentation of this), Does This Make Me An Alcoholic? By that point in the evening/afternoon/12:15 p.m. I'd been drinking, though one moment stands out. I was seriously considering drinking at lunch sponsored by the Campus, in honor of the seniors on the staff, two girls and I. The editor in chief, a junior, was sitting a couple chairs down and said to us "hey, you guys can order drinks, it's after noon" and I seriously considered it for a couple minutes.

Does that make me an alcoholic? Not really.

I find myself wishing I had something alcoholic more and more often. Today, I reached for a Coke. (I always wondered when I didn't drink, which was worse, having a local beer or Coke, since ehhhh, technically, alcohol was bad, but wasn't Coke's stranglehold on Indian water as well as other "understandings" with the world I'm not aware of, worse?) Anyway. It was a Coke today. Monday, it was a Hershey bar. Just something sweet. Something to stave off that feeling of "You know what would make this better? Booze!"

And booze won't make it better. I know this. I know what booze does to my head. It just makes me think things are better and limits my inhibitors, which can be useful in some scenarios and terrible in others. I know the reason why I associate happiness with alcohol is because I drink a lot with my friends and that's fun, because we're all less inhibited and more prone to drunken singing and fun times.

I'm still using the present tense there. I should know better. That was that. I mean, I'm still thinking about plans to return to Allegheny, but it's not until next year at the earliest. But even then, it won't be the same. You can't go home, I know. Some of this is as simple as I wish I did different things over the last four years. Jesus, I wish I was more social, got out of my room senior year. I wish I had kissed more girls. Taken more chances with different girls. Said "Here's my number. Call me." Instead of just walking away after saying something nice at the bar.

Whatever. (And in the 8 minutes between writing that and coming back, I saw an image of Jade and Davey from AFI, years and years ago, playing ping-pong during a break in recording Art of Drowning and am now much happier.) Something so out of place and gloriously unprepared for a band that has historically spent a lot of time on image for their live shows just makes me smile and is a wonderful yogurt for my mental palate.

Back to the continued desire for alcohol. I know something about it. I know that I'm confusing my desire to be around people whom I already trust and love with the desire to drink. The two run together when I'm not doing anything except waiting for people to get back to me. It's been three weeks swallowed. Lord, how the time has passed me by.

Speaking of three weeks swallowed, I've been spending far too long looking at Facebook to see what Allegheny kids are up to. I miss them. But I've said that over and over again. I wake up in 6 hours, less now, to Iowa to visit family. It's my hope I can use that time to not check Facebook for a week. To fling myself into the reality of being in Chicago with no plans to come back to what I did or used to do. There's little things I can take with me, though. I'm hoping at least one gaming group at home comes through. To get me to meet new people. Start new relationships. Fire up old ones.

Facebook makes it easy to get caught up in old relationships and to go awwww. (Woah. My world just did a bit of a rotation and I wasn't in control of my head.) I have hit the iChat button three times out of habit within the last two minutes. I think that says something. I'm addicted to the constant pulse of the buddy list. Knowing people are there, just by look at that list on the right or lefthand corner of my screen.

At Allegheny, I had something like that buddy list. Call up Zach or James head over to their rooms to chill when I was confused or depressed or needed to talk. I had that mental safety net. Chicago, I'm just waiting for my good, good friends to come back. Now, Iowa offers me an opportunity to spend a weekend without that safety net.

It's my hope that the time this goes up that I'm asleep, but also, that while I'm away, I won't get on the internet or check shit. Detox, whether it's alcohol or constant communication. Reconnect with me. To prove to me that I can do that. To interact with people without Twitter, Facebook, IM clients and Gmail. Just me and my family. Maybe even turn off my phone and be disconnected and in this moment, fully, without any external stimuli.

And if I can do that for three days, then I can do that for a week. And if I can do it for a week, what about two? It's that kind of growth that I think would make my friends (and myself) most proud, that if I do come back to Allegheny, for a weekend or something next year, it won't be as a grad limping back to the school for "the old days" but as part of a positively evolving person, moving forward.

To really get the most out of the Allegheny experience, looking back, I must recognize that it wasn't just a dream and that these experiences are things I can take with me as I walk further on the path of life and return to these experiences at different points in my life to gleam different lessons from them.

This blog, in as much as it is a statement, it isn't a road that will take me to the stars, but it's hopefully, a road that will see me through. Now, to decipher what the signs mean.

This Blog Is About Waterboarding (And My Guilt)

2009-05-25T14:30:00.001-04:00

On the heels of the news that Strike Anywhere was signing to Bridge Nine and was moving away from Dead FM as a sound, I've come to listen to Dead FM nearly nonstop and realize that it is, categorically, Strike Anywhere's best record for its combination of enthusiasm, solidarity and joy.

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised then, that while writing this blog about anger, spite and torture I listened to the record ~~five~~ six times, straight through. Consider purchasing a copy.

Also, it's Memorial Day. There's a lot of patriotic sentiment going around today about supporting the troops, so, in a slightly different vein, here's a link to the United State's Veteran's Affairs website about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When soldiers (of all stripes and nations) get back, some of them can't leave their time in combat on the battlefield and it's them I want you to remember, especially.

I take it back.

I've said, loudly and irregularly, that members of ex-President Bush's cabinet ought to face waterboarding as some kind of a penance and poetic justice for their crimes inside and outside of the inland territories of the United States. After watching an occurrence of waterboarding, I take it back.

A local shock jock I dislike got waterboarded recently and there's a youtube clip up if you care to look. I'm not mentioning their name or even gender, because I don't want this person to get more attention or pageviews. Suffice to say I find their entire program to be racist, sexist, homophobic and unimaginative. I viewed this person as exactly the opposite of what I wanted to grow up like. I view this on-air personality, at a minimum, as repugnant and chauvinistic.

This personality lost a bet, is what I remember and the consequence is enduring a form of torture known as waterboarding. It's pretty much simulated drowning, but you know this already. I found embedded video on Facebook and my face lit up. I hit the play button and the scene unfolded in front of me.

There's EMTs standing by and at least two video cameras, along with another DJ (the show must go on!) and a photographer. So, when I see a black rag being put over their nose and eyes and I see the Marine overseeing the entire enterprise preparing the gallon of water, I was ready. I knew what to do. Reptile brain, get ready for the overload of comeuppance and pleasure in seeing a person I despise drown. The initial repetition of "the normal person can only stand 14 seconds" struck me of the same infantile traditional fratboy dominance games that masquerade as generic male bonding, but whatever. Motherfucker's getting waterboarded! It's about time!

The intensity was ratcheted up. Feet were tied so as restrain the subject, and the other announcer kept asking his friend if they were ready. Sure as ever that the coming waterfall was nothing to worry, the subject instructed the Marine to get on with it. Out comes the clear gallon of water. I wanted to feel sorry for the water that it was being used to go into the nose and mouth of a person who spent their day disenfranchising minorities and women, calling it all good in the name of entertainment and comedy.

Down came the water. I got a little bit of joy when I saw the water leave the container, the promise that what would come next would please me even more, when the simulated drowning would really take effect.

It didn't come.

Water stopped being poured after seven seconds, the personality saying it was enough and it was horrific. But aside from the visible, but minuscule vindication of my ethical standpoint, I feel worse, demonstrably, for having watched that. Certainly, one, I am contributing, virally, to the the continued success of the DJ, but more that waterboarding is torture on anyone, even those I loathe and it's not fun for me to watch, regardless of who it is being practiced on.

I thought I would get a sick pleasure in seeing the person in pain, but I felt, for the most part, disgusted. I let my own petty, ingrained hate override my beliefs. What does it say about me that I thought I would get some kicks out of watching an overgrown child getting tortured and I went through with it? I chose to click that youtube link. I chose to hit start on that video. What does it say about me that I got caught up in bad blood that frankly, I should have grown up and moved on from years ago?

I don't want to say something as stark as torture is torture, but watching a person think they're drowning is harrowing enough, even a computer screen or two removed from the incident. Still, take another look at the second paragraph above this one. The phrase "It's not fun for me to watch" sticks out. Looking back on that just makes me think, "Dude, what were you thinking? Of course it's not going to be fun. It's torture."

But more to the point, why did I let myself get into a judgment where I might have to weigh the potential pleasure to see a corrosive personality get waterboarded versus my distaste for the practice? It's obvious. I was blinded by spite and chose to indulge voyerism.

There's an obvious parallel here. Important portions of the United States government were blinded and made choices, too. They had go through labyrinthine means and some pretty bizzare memos to legalize the use of torture and even then, something still felt wrong. I suppose, after seeing it used, myself, on someone willing, I'm no longer willing to run my mouth about forcing 60 or 70 year old men to experience it themselves, despite the fact that they ordered it.

I'm technically well aware of just how much damage what those Cabinet members ordered and signed off on has done to this country, both in terms of what this opens up for our enemies, but also in terms of the United States' international credibility. They ought to pay a high price for their crimes, but I'm not sure torture is the right punishment. In this case, I'm not sure the crime they legalized fits the crime they committed.

I just want for torture not to be used, period. But, failing that, I just don't want it to be used in my name. For all the times that has happened (and especially on Memorial Day), I'm sorry. I can't take back the pain. But, after watching it happen, to someone who thought they could handle it, I can make a promise to speak out even louder against it when I see evidence it is being used, in the hope that when it is used again, it isn't by hands of this country, whether it's our agents performing the procedure or our agents pulling the strings from overseas.

Too many have died already around the world this year. Too many more will next year and the year after that, too. I'm going to thank that DJ for bringing a bit of the war (and the realization of horror that comes with it) home to me for Memorial Day. Tomorrow, that personality will be back on air, spewing their garbage and poisonous rhetoric, but that's for tomorrow.

Today is Memorial Day.

Moar Because...

2009-05-20T00:05:00.001-04:00

I wrote about returning and I can't do that. It's officially my first real week back from college, which is scary, off-putting and exciting. After working until 11 p.m. (long into the night at least in Chicago time), last night, I finally stopped hitting snooze on my cell phone at 8:30 a.m. to finish up the grade checking I was doing. I didn't like it, but it got me up. More to the point, it introduced, politely, the idea that I can't just do what I want anymore and plan my work or studying around it, like I used to at Allegheny. I miss the people, not the institution. After four years of being in Meadville, there are little rituals that feel strange not to be continuing.

It's those little things that make the big difference. Not wearing my keys around my neck, not bringing a card whenever I leave the house, not going to a centralized place for lunch, not putting on a backpack to leave the house (I've been doing that for 12+ years), not walking the 45 seconds to the post office, not chilling in GFC for two or three hours after class are all the things that are interesting, different experiences, that I never would have had if I didn't push myself a lot.

I'm in danger of not pushing myself now. It's very easy for me to sit back and just sit at the computer, refreshing my email every so often and keeping current on whatever subject I'm looking at from afar (economic meltdown, suicide terrorism, future plans of the Wu-Tang Clan). Every fifteen minutes I spend looking at things to stay current is another fifteen minutes I could spend looking at grad schools or filling out job applications or finding driving schools in Chicago.

Scott Kurtz (of PvP) recently announced he was trying to change his habits now that he was working from home so that he actually got work done, getting up earlier to get that "quiet home in the dark" time, better to get up at 5 a.m. and get to it. Getting to it, then.

On the right side of this tab, there are four tabs that all have something to do with driving schools in Chicago. On the left, six others. Two of them CDs. One of them a well-reviewed, but not much purchased PS2 game, one Twitter, one Blogger and another one for Windy's one or two shot campaign. I originally wrote time to choose, but I don't think it's quite that simple. I have to focus and remember, I'm not planning my work around my free time anymore. I'm planning my free time around my work.

Sometimes, the work will be fun. I need to call up my friend anyway and talk to her for a while about how much money she's going to want designing my webpage and what I want out of it, including twitter integration and whatever else I feel like ought to be done with it. If I am going to set something up seriously to be a writer/blogger (for which a personal webpage is needed) about music/videogames/politics/whatever, than that means maybe buying a PS3 makes sense from an economic standpoint. I need to cover these things, right?

Most of the other time, it's not going to be fun. It's going to be depressing, bleak and tedious. But it's a down payment on getting to a place where I can keep growing and have fun while I earn money. But before I can get to the point where it's fun, or I enjoy what I do, I need a plan. That plan involves a lot of honest thinking and questioning what I want to do with my life in the future. I never seriously entertained the idea that I was going to be alive through college when I was in junior or high school.

Now that the future I never expected has come to pass, it means my habits are changing and now...to figure out what, exactly, I want. Once that figures out, the details can be chewed on.

And, because it's me, probably here. More than that, it's tough to stay positive when you don't do that much or few exciting things happen, or as I learned this semester, if I don't go out. And by go out I don't mean party so much as just leave the house and do something. Run or walk or just get out of whatever comfortable space I'm in.

Therefore, while I'm not committed to somewhere, I'm committing myself to these ideas: Get out of that comfort zone. Just keep moving. Keep doing different things, not just to keep busy, but to keep pushing myself. Keep growing.

So then, what do I do with the two boxes of videogames in my home? I'm hopefully not going to do what I did last year, which was park in front of my TV after searching for jobs for a couple months and playing Persona 3 until three in the morning, going to bed and doing it all over again.

A schedule that I can keep. It just needs to be coherent. Even if it goes something along the lines of:

Immediate Future: 9-2.
Future Future: 2-5
Chilling Out That Happens Before Dinner: 5-7
Videogames: 8-10
Daily Show Then Bed: 10-10:45

It's not anything...detailed, but it's something that will give substance to my day, around which I can plan whatever my next big move is on the chessboard of my lifetime. There are two questions left, then, can I get to a point where I see the board, and once there, how do I analyze the information?

I don't have the answer currently, but I think I'm on the right track now and whatever happens along the way, well, you'll see it here, first, as close to firsthand as these instruments on the end of my arms will allow me.

Quality Or Quantity: More About Rock Band And Guitar Hero

2009-05-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

By now you've been inundated with articles all asking the question "Is Guitar Hero/Rock Band going to save rock and roll?" I was reading one of the latest of these in the March issue of the Atlantic this year, and it felt like most of the rest of the articles in this style, someone, who at one point in their lives, had liked rock and roll when rock and roll ruled the entertainment world, saw the steady decline of rock and roll in its own hedonism and now sees "the kids" are coming back to rock.

The answer, is of course, yes, but that's assuming rock and roll needs to be saved. I don't think it does. There will be rock bands on top of the world and living lavish lifestyles beyond my fascination or imagination, but it's not going to globally dominating. What I think a lot of these people want, secretly, is not for rock and roll to be saved, but to be returned to the cultural touchstone it once was among the youth, everywhere. Sadly (for them), hip-hop and electronic music crashed the party and not all the youth dream in distorted guitar solos these days.

The industry will be fine, but they're going to have to adjust to new expectations. Those new expectations are simple: Records are not going to be diamond certified any more, unless digital sales are taken into account and a record is really, really lucky. So, if rock and roll is Motley Crue or Van Halen, then yes, rock is dead and it's not coming back. There are too many avenues to hear bands that aren't controlled by labels or radio stations and this means that among other things, that there probably won't be those same kind of cultural touchstones.

Music, nay, performance, lives and dies, James Parker, notes (at the end of that same peice), in the heads of teenagers everywhere, which is good, because Guitar Hero and Rock Band enable that. These products, hopefully, he says are exciting a new generation of rockers. And I include myself in that and enjoy these products, because, frankly, I don't have the backbone or courage to start a band of my own and it feels real fucking good to scream along to any Rage Against the Machine song, putting the microphone to my friends who also know the song and might be playing.

And yes, I know it's not real guitars and real drums. Baudrillard would be hung up on that. I'm not. It's a reasonable approximation of rocking out for the purpose of having fun and blowing off steam. But, as Parker mentions, rock and roll was always based on some delusion, whether it was a band starting wanting to be like an earlier group, or doing covers or, just being silly.

I see Rock Band and Guitar Hero in that tradition and the idea of hyperreality doesn't enter my mind. I know it's not real. It's not supposed to be real. It is supposed to mimic. That's why all the crazy avatars are there. It's not a real band. It's just fucking around and having fun. If you know anything about bands, then I might have just come full circle. Most bands start out as not being serious and then snowballing from there.

So, in the sense that Rock Band and Guitar Hero is not trying to be real, the closer it comes to being authentic. Funny thing, that. I wonder Baudriallard would think, but I hope he'd have the prensence of mind to drop the pretense and pick up a plastic instrument.

Quality Or Quantity: Textiles

2009-05-15T23:01:00.003-04:00

I saw pictures from high school, tonight when I was cleaning out my drawers, looking for underwear and a cross. See, I get up tomorrow (at 7 a.m.) to work a law school graduation and I ended up peering into a drawer that had developed pictures in it. (Imagine that. Physical pictures, with negatives!) Those pictures dragged me back, kindly, back to different times.

Apparently, I spent a lot of time in the computer lab, with older girls that I thought were attractive and if I remember correctly, treated me like their younger brother. There are worse fates, I suppose. There's pictures of spending time at Six Flags, which for the life of me, I don't remember except being on a bus to go there and get back to school on literally, the far other side of the city. This ignores the pictures of which I am embarrassed after concerts and being so young and being so incredibly excited to see a band (in some huge arena) who'se members I am beginning to become closer to five, six years later.

So there's change and, I'll probably mention the pictures to the drummer the next time I see him online, so that bodes well, right? But.

There was something about innocence in those photos, but something...else. I genuinely did not remember the cute girl who was the math professor's (or was it science?) daughter that I look back on and now realize that she may have been my first real crush when I was old enough to have an understanding of what it meant. I remember she liked to sing. She also liked the Grateful Dead.

I forgot about her existence. Completely, until I saw that picture again. This was all pre-Facebook and...well, I guess people are right. I will forget. You will forget. I will probably forget all about a couple of girls within 4 or 5 years. I am aware that's a long time.

The more frightening question this brings up is when I found the other piece of memorabilia, the Celtic cross purchased in Ireland when I was 19. There was a prolonged breakup that happened and began to unravel over that trip, which cast a pall over the time I spent there. (Strangely enough, my mother, who otherwise is a by the book kind of woman, offered to get me a Guiness while I was there, where it would be legal, despite having an allergic aversion to me imbing alcohol in the States.) The relationship was pretty much over, or I kept trying to force it and it wouldn't take and it spilled over the Atlantic and over the last semster of that year.

I said a lot of things over that period of time I'm not proud of and have since sworn never to say again, which, so far, I've been keeping. I still hang my head in shame even obliquely mentioning that.

I have to go to bed now, but I'm left with the question: Would I remember that girlfriend (my first!) if it wasn't for the absolute douchebaggery that I pulled and the Fallout-esque aftermath? I hope not, but seeing those pictures makes me wonder now, all the same.

The internet is like amber for the things that embarass us (and occasionally make us proud) and looking at those pictures make me wonder how I ever stuck those dead bugs with pins...

Quality Or Quantity: War Games

2009-05-14T21:10:00.003-04:00

Here's a surprise: A game based on an actual, ongoing war, is going to have an uphill battle to climb.

The response to a feature on Six Days in Fallujah on Kotaku has been interesting. Some people have come right out of the gate saying that there's a double standard here being placed on videogames about the battle, that other mediums of communication are allowed to get away with and game aren't. I know I went over this elsewhere, but I really just skimmed over it.

Nestled in the comments to the feature, a lot is put forward in short, sarcastic sentences. (Oooooh, alliteration!) One rewarding conversation path is the idea of the anti-war videogame. (Apparently, the Metal Gear Solid series does not count.) Can a videogame based on a war be realistic and enjoyable?

I don't think so. War, to me, is horrible, visceral and sickening. It's not terribly often going in guns blazing into the enemy's compound with the element of surprise and the fate of the universe in the balance. From my limited understanding (in the current Iraq quagmire), it's far more often about pounding the pavement, talking to people who may or may not be shooting at you with a mask the day before, or if you're not in combat, watching employees of KBR, Titan or another multinational with no clear chain of command do your job for six times more money. That's not entertaining or exciting. When it gets exciting, the soldier the imaginary player is following usually isn't on the good side of the gun (if such a side exists) and members of the platoon tend to die, in the heat of battle, with or without a medic screaming and crying for help.

The player is used to having precise control over the soldiers movements and the ability to distance themselves from what's going on. Ignoring the mechanical challenge of engrossing the player into avoiding the pause button, do players really want to see what happens to troops when they lose control over their emotions, tempers and selves and be forced to carry it out?

Take this possibility: Let's say you, the player is pinnned down and you are given orders: Lay down some covering fire over where you think the enemy is. It later turns out they're not in there, and you might have lit up an unrelated grocery store or pizza shop.

Even worse, having to enter a building without information about hostiles that might be waiting for you inside the door and standard operating procedure is throwing 3 or 4 frag grenades to soften up the inside for intrustion. These grenades buy you a crucial amount of time, if enemies are in there, because otherwise, they'll shoot you (and likely kill you) when you enter. What if the enemy is hiding in a school building or hospital? Or if it's in a building that's been abandoned, but you've heard reports of civillians running out of screaming?

Do players want that? That's more realistic, I think, but I doubt it would be enjoyable or entertaining. I doubt the experience would be one where the replay value would be discussed so much as shock and abject horror.

I suppose I am tipping my hand here, but would one call this game anti-war? Or, to actually use some of the education I've recieved, would it be a hyper-war game?

Perhaps I'll write on the questions it brings up for tomorrow: Would anyone care? Would it be boycotted? Would parents shelter their children from it? Is it better for children to be sheltered from it and grow up later to support it?

Quality Or Quantity: Returning

2009-05-13T23:06:00.000-04:00

Today (well, tonight), it's about my own fear of the future and falling into comfortable traps or living patterns, using Crime In Stereo as the thread that ties the ideas together.

I can't listen to Crime In Stereo anymore. At least not until they release something new. It's not that I've gotten tired of them or that I've stopped thinking about what lyrics I want to get tattooed on me. I still haven't, but that the songs that aren't about girls are imbued with a sense of my time spent at Allegheny College. Listening to "Love" or "Takbir" not walking up the hill to the Campus Center on the mean streets of Meadville feels wrong.

I haven't learned to come back yet. Whether it's seeing a particular ex-girlfriend or an ex-city I'm living in again. It takes a lot of pain to see the same people/places/songs/ideas with different lenses. I haven't listened to "For Exes" in months. I've been force-feeding myself "...But You Are Vast" because that's one of the songs they play live and well, I want to be able to scream along without showing any other emotion. (There's not much room for guys doing non-heteronormative things at shows, and I already have a couple strikes against me: I have long, blond hair that I refuse to dye, spike or mohawk and wear glasses.) I have not yet listened to Animal Pharm since returning and considering the intensity of that feeling when I first heard the song, I'm not looking forward to it showing up by accident on my iPod.

Entering Chicago without real prospects except sleep and write as much as I can in a low pressure environment doesn't really feel like anything except the idea that I'm disappointing my parents and friends isn't coming back. It's returning to whatever I was doing in between semester of college.

I already return too much. I can't even listen to Explosives and the Will to Use Them without returning to those thoughts of days and nights in Meadville. (I can assure you, moving back to the big city has neutered my nightlife considerably. Maybe when I start getting back out to shows will my life get more interesting, but for now, I am comforted by my stacks of books and videogames to be read and played.) Perhaps I am expecting too much of myself to rid myself of deeply entrenched feelings with songs only days removed from my previous context. Alex (via Kristian) is right: The memories invade the things I keep with me.

I recognize that it is probably emotionally unhealthy for me to return to gut wrenching songs over girls and people but hell, there's a bounce in my step when I hear "Arson at 563" or "Terribly Softly" that I don't get anywhere else.

It's not all bad news, though. I'm getting to bed here a lot earlier than I would I would at Allegheny, I'm taking better care of myself and I'm watching what I eat. Gimme a couple days and I'll probably get more exercise, too. Part of me is happier here, in between the sadness that comes along with being separated from a group of people you're close to. But! Within a couple months, my high school friends will be back from their colleges and I will hopefully be seeing them on weekends or weekdays, if I am lucky. They will lift my spirits, and hopefully, I can lift theirs, if they need lifting. Please don't remind me that it won't be like this next year.

I have returned to my parent's house. The problem is, I just need to come back.

Quality Or Quantity: Transitions

2009-05-12T18:54:00.007-04:00

This is part of an experiment. I'm challenging myself to write something between four hundred and seven hundred words every day this week, after I got a bunch of positive feedback about it on Twitter. Maybe this is the first out of five. Maybe this is the first out of seven. I don't know, but there's going to at least four more coming, so if you're reading this on May 12 or 13th, keep your browser pointed here throughout the week.

The inside jokes: Quality or Quantity is a Bad Religion song, if my memory is right, from Against the Grain, my favorite record of theirs. Early in the Eleven Names development, Zach and I had an argument about quality versus quantity, that, famously, got nowhere and lead to my aggravation.

Thanks.

I don't think I can usefully avoid writing about transitions. Certainly, there's obvious parallels in my own life, in the form of graduating from college and then trying to figure out what I should do now that I have a little bit of time. I'm tightest in college with people a grade above me and my friends from around this city, I haven't seen in far too long.

There's still a room full of my college things in the room across from this one, but I can't really get started working on clearing it out until I sort through which clothes are dirty and which aren't. That might be a fool's errand, but I need to get on some kind of errand sooner rather than later. Not to mention that I left all my PlayStation 2 games and most frighteningly my memory card back in college, and I'm hoping the games got stashed in one of my friend's cars to be brought back to New Jersey or California, where they can be sent back to me. (Edit: the games are now in New Jersey and can be sent to me soon!)

These parallels strike me deeper than I want to admit, whether it's in what I do or how I want to crash back on the bed as opposed to calling up whatever the hell red mango is (apparently, it's an upscale place for frozen yogurt) and see if they're hiring, or having to look at all the t-shirts I've brought back from college and kept since high school and think, these are going to have to go.

That last example is painful to think about because of what those shirts mean to me and what they represent. I mean, really, how am I going to let go of a classic Midtown shirt, considering that band broke up three, four years ago (and I loved Save the World, Lose the Girl)? Or a relatively new Kid Dynamite one? My memories of rocking out on the Metra Electric Line after work at the Midway office are entwined with that shirt. (And I hope I'm never letting go of my Zombie Apocalypse shirt.)

Transitions, man. Black t-shirts to black button up longsleeves. Maybe then to white button up longsleeves. But then, this is all part of growing up, right? Putting away those childish things to make room for new adventures. The movement from "has lots of talent" to actually using that talent, or actually submitting those writing samples somewhere.

It's putting one foot forward in front of the other, whether it's from Meadville to Chicago, Chicago to Pittsburgh or from one block to another, the house to the concrete walls where a beach should be overlooking Lake Michigan. It's about not comparing myself to hipsters, or hipsters bitching about hipsters or to anyone else. The journey of a lifetime begins with a single step and putting the foot in the shoe and then that shoe on the pavement is the transition.

I know, intellectually, that I don't have to put away my videogames, and if I did, it would be an incredible waste of time, talent, emotion and desire, but that they're not (or shouldn't be) a social or intellectual focus on par with the other activities that will take up my time and imagination. I love writing columns. I think it's what I want to do until I can't think or analyze anymore. I also love videogames and punk rock music. Perhaps I don't have to choose between writing or the two other things I love, but figure out how to do all three at once.

That synthesis would be amazing. Getting paid to write (something I enjoy doing) about video games and punk rock music (something else I enjoy). Integrating my interests (both leisurely and on the clock) and taking the steps to make that reasonable for employment is a lot of hard, boring work of finding a website, a niche, a style, promotion and also just a lot of composition and, finally, content generation. It's not glamorous, (but then again, neither is selling high-end frozen yogurt) but it must be done if I want to, in the future, do what I want and be the person hanging above my own head making sure the work gets done.

Maybe that's the real transition.

We've Gotta Stay Positive

2009-04-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.

Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

...

...

...

I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just ~~can~~ has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.

Finished Demos: The Ideal

2009-04-19T23:30:00.001-04:00

I don't know how much else is left to say. I think this game (Six Days in Fallujah) is going to fail. I think it's too big for the development team. I hope it doesn't, but there's too much other shit going on around this game. Case in point: I doubt that the dev team and the bigwigs are on the same page when the bigwigs say that "We're not trying to make social commentary...We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable" and one of the stated goal of the game is to give players ethical dilemas in the shoes of real soldiers.

But, before the game finds a life in the hands of Papa Bear and his ilk (not that I'm singling out Bill O'Reilly here), I wanted to talk about it in tones that are respectful and distant, if not hopeful. I'm pessimistic. This needs to succeed in a way to shake up gamers, the press and eveyrone looking over the team's shoulder. There's an outside chance that the people making this have that kind of a game in them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not that my two cents carries much weight.

Anyway. The title is a song by the Explosion, off of their near-perfect Jade Tree full length called Flash Flash Flash. Go buy the CD right now and listen to one of the best punk rock records put to tape this decade. The Ideal starts with the lyric: "There are no good Samaritans. There are no proud Americans. This isn't my idea of success."

Perfect.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is a third-person shooter game set to be released sometime in 2010.

I usually don't get too concerned when I hear titles, but when I heard about the game I seized up. The president of Atomic Games, the company producing the game in conjunction with the Marine Corps and Activision, says they want “Six Days In Fallujah” to be the most realistic military shooter ever.

As a genre, shooters are not known for careful examination of their surroundings. Look at Gears of War 2. That game was as deep as a dog's water dish, but is a fantastic success, not just because it's executed nearly perfectly, but also because it didn't really challenge players. (Okay, Dom tried to find his wife and players complained that he was "too bitchy" during the game.) So a game based on a real-life six-day battle is going to be a tough sell—not to mention a difficult thing to write, script and program.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is based on a careful recreation of one of the longest instances of close-quarters combat the U.S. Marine Corps has been involved in since World War II. To get it right, the developers took the extra step of talking to some of the insurgents involved as well as Fallujah’s civilians.

Read that last sentence again. That's gonna be a sticking point.

Even ignoring the inevitable public outrage over the background work (which in any other medium would be reasonable), there is the larger issue of whose interests the developers are looking out for or sweeping under the rug.

The civilians are going to have a different perspective on the fighting and the tactics employed by both the insurgents who came to Iraq to fight the Jihad and the indiscriminate use of firepower by members of the United States Marine Corps. Oh, and both the irregulars fighting against the Americans and the Marines are going to have different (and truthful) perspectives that are going to skew how the game ought to be portrayed.

The Marines aren't going to be happy if the creators mention the pre-attack bombings Fallujah was subject to or the military’s offensive use of white phosphorous. The insurgents who risked their lives to talk to the game’s developers aren't going to be happy if the fact that members of their group used the civilian population as shields for their indiscriminate attacks is revealed. Oh, and let's not forget a coherent, well-designed game has to be made out of this, one that will make Activision and consumers happy.

“Six Days In Fallujah” has a lot of external hurdles ahead of it — a public suspicious of videogames and commentators looking for an easy topic to boost ratings.

But I think the biggest problem is internal. There's a lot of conflicting, accurate representations of those six days, so how do you pare down the experiences from all these different perspectives to something that resembles the truth? How do you put an ESRB rating on it?

“Six Days In Fallujah” frightens me because this game’s going to be in the spotlight and the creators have the time and money to dig themselves into a pretty big hole. To get the experience right, “Six Days in Fallujah” needs to set a milestone in storytelling. Frankly, I doubt the team is up to the challenge. I want them to succeed, but everyone looking over their shoulder has a different measure of success. And these are just the thematic concerns.

How, exactly, do you make a scripted third person shooter that acknowledges the claustrophobia of high density urban combat and still remains fun? Realism is hard to acknowledge when the actual soldiers can only clear buildings for an hour or two, tops and regularly pass out from heat exhaustion. If it's going to be realistic, then there is going to have to be an imposing penalty for using heavy automatic weapons on the map and huge bonuses for using less heavy weapons, which runs counter intuitive to the expectations the traditional player base.

The parallel that leaps to mind is Rainbow Six videogame series, which was realistic enough to dictate that when of the members of your unit got shot, they were pretty much down for the count if they were lucky. If they weren't, they're dead. Unfortunately, Fallujah isn't a series of three story office buildings or flat surfaces and building clearing is nerve wracking, when your enemies choose where, when and how the fight is happening is not what gamers are used to.

Gamers (I include myself in this) are used to having nigh-invincible, emotionally vacant, masculine demi-gods as their avatars, ones that have exquisite fire control and never empty a clip of ammunition to a room of people or prisoners because they've just been psychologically broken by seeing their friend's head explode in front of them. Are the developers of Six Days really going to digitally wrest control from the player at times and possibly alienate the players and force them to acknowledge how far removed our digital heroes are from flesh and blood?

Sherman said war is hell and I'd be willing to bet that with that description most gamers would expect "Doom". Let's hope I'm wrong.

Finished Demos: It's A Pretty Good Song, Babe, You Know the Rest

2009-04-04T13:38:00.000-04:00

We're not dead. We just don't update regularly and my normal columns don't have an easy parallel here. So. I gave this to a college writing magazine at the end of January, and that issue still hasn't been published.

I eminently dislike sitting on writing when the only thing that's keeping from being seen is sorority obligations, which are things that do not hold a large amount of power in my life. Anyway. This piece (whenever it comes out) will be called Let Me Take You Out and it is about, well, girls and boys presuming there is a right time and place to go back to for authentic romantic expression.

Fuck that. (Oh, the title comes from a Gaslight Anthem song.)

What makes romantic expression authentic is the intent behind it, not when it was expressed and if that gets obscured, then I think we're in a world of trouble. Whenever this gets published on paper, I hope, I hope, I hope that the introduction below gets printed with it.

Romance, like love, might be beyond verbal expression. I don't even know if it's appropriate to say I'm grasping in the right direction, because that would suggest a Platonic form (look it up) of romance, which is not an idea I currently want to commit to. Remember: I don't know romance and I never will.

Hugs/Kisses,
Charles Victor Szasz

There's this little thing that's clawing away at the back of my mind: Romance isn't dead, but there are some people that are pretty determined to pronounce it dead on arrival despite its steady breathing and lively EKG.

Before I even begin, let's make it clear who I'm not speaking about. The kids (and adults) who go out to places where they can drink alcohol and orgasm mutually are not really a part of this discussion. if you want to complain that they're killing romance, this isn't the venue.

It's the kids who are trying to "go back" to an earlier era of courtesy and social cues that have been overly romanticized. (These people may be related to the people who think World War II was the Good War. I loathe the Holocaust, but there is no good war Ever. [More crimes were averted, I'll grant you that.] Over 40 million died in over World War II. To put that in perspective, go to a beach. Now imagine each grain of sand is a naked, ruined corpse, pale from malnourishment and smeared with the excrement of the lifeless vessels on top of them. That's war.) You know the type. Cynically, they're the douchebags who think that with a fedora and an antiquated dress code, they're somehow being gentlemen or ladies. They seem to have mistaken being romantic for being suave. I have no words for them, but then again, I've constructed them as an easy target.

Less cynically, but more pointedly, there's the people who genuinely believe that there is some golden age for romance to go back to and closely adhering to that standard will make them romantic. It's this group that's more worrisome to me, since they're more authentically disposed towards the idea, but are heading in a direction which avoids the problems that they claim to have a solution to.

Some say Victorian England, some say it's the period before the Second World War (1920-1940), some go to France, but all say that Romance is dead with a seriousness that makes me smirk. Romance, as I characterize it, the crossroads of concern, humility, sentiment and action, can't ever die because there's always going to be something genuine there. Modern Life is War got it right with "Fuck the Sex Pistols": The grass was never green. There was never purity. Some say it's all over. Stupid fucking jaded burnouts...You don't get to decide. It's ours. Go away. Shut up. Little else in my mind needs to be said. It is the genuine emotion that can never be a product of a particular time and place that makes love and the expression of it romantic.

It's the why and less the how, and that's where I take umbrage with this group of well-meaning kids who want to go back to something else. They want it to be codified, written down and definitive. There aren't many hard and fast rules to go by and for a lot of people, that's frightening. That's their prerogative, though, as is the focus of this submission, I believe they're barking up the wrong tree. I do not mourn the death of labyrinthine social codes around romancing the people of your desire. I don't think it's a good idea to go back to a time when the idea of romance was limited to straight white people. I am supposed to show you how much I care by giving you a rose or dancing slowly? How disappointingly limiting, not to mention exclusionary.

Going "back" to something lacks the ability to grow and blossom with the different intersections of gender, desire and sex, that are finally acceptable to express in public in the college's bounds and in some large cities. Our traditional dances are gendered for men who like women and women who like men. But you know that already. Remember, people are left out by these universal romancing ways. The reason why things like putting your jacket down over a puddle so the girl doesn't have to step in the water are supposedly romantic is because it comes out of a desire to make the person's life a little easier, cost be damned. Just to see you smile, as Tim McGraw sings, is the essence of the idea.

Romance is (Did I just type that? If you ever see the phrase "something is" without any kind of background, your bullshit detector should go off loud and clear.) an ideal that is meant to be reached for and never grasped, I believe (Phew.). You, I or anyone else can never ever think of ourselves as romantics, because at that point where I think I've got it, I've lost it. It's in the humility of knowing you would give up what you have for your lover but knowing that your lover would never ask it of you. It is crucial now to mention that I do not submit myself as any kind of answer to the questions I pose. I will feign suggestions but I am far too suspicious, neurotic and unreasonably paranoid to be a model for anyone, except in what not to do. (Did I mention the low self-esteem and depression?)

If you want to be romantic, I think you ought to first figure out what romantic means to you, and apply those ideas to a modern context. I initially compared this to Batman, but somehow, using a fictitious character who is almost completely incapable of sustaining a meaningful adult relationship (sexual or emotional) seems wrong here. You will make mistakes. I will make mistakes. It hurts. It breaks. But, in making the mistakes you are acknowledging the ever-expanding possibilities of modern interaction and expression that didn't exist during a fictitious Golden Era, whether it's comic books or Americana.

I don't feign to understand romance. I just see people looking in one direction and I think I see what they're describing in a different direction. I'm very, very distrustful of the desire to go back or say anything is dead. But then again, I'm a white heterosexual male, I've hardly ever needed help raising my voice.

Demos: In A Million Pieces

2009-03-11T10:59:00.004-04:00

The title is a bit of a double entendre. In A Million Pieces is a record by the Draft, which I heartily endorse, but the name still might ring a different bell. A Million Little Pieces is a book that lots of people read, only to find out the author lied, fabricated or distorted much of his own life in the book. In a piece about reading and literacy, it's fun to echo a book that many people have read and been excited about only to be disappointed.

Plus, there's been a post...three out of the last five days. Can we keep it going?

In 2003 the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) put out a list of 100 of England's favorite books, based on a poll of their viewers. Now, in 2009, it is getting reborn as a Facebook meme.

The Facebook-spread meme heading states that the BBC believes people will read only six out of the 100 books. A quick Google search yields nothing from the BBC's perspective, so this heading sounds fictitious. (I think I saw this float around Livejournal once back in the earlier part of this decade. What's old is new again.) But that's not the real issue. The real issue in my mind is that this seems to be interpreted by otherwise intelligent people as a sign that we are living in illiterate times.

They might be right, but not for the reasons they think.

One, they're just going along with something they saw on the internet, but more importantly, that list isn't the arbiter of who or what is literate. (There are reading comprehension problems because until recently United States schools were not promised a lot of money—especially those that did not teach white kids.)
The list wasn't meant to be definitive, but even if it was trying to be, it never could be. There is always going to be something important left out. The list is written from one perspective, which privileges one form of expression over another.

White people writing in a traditional manner are overly represented and graphic novels are non-existent. But what's important to me is the reactions.
Many of the responses on Facebook I see appear to be a variation of the following: "I haven't read enough of these" or "based on the fact that more people haven't read these books, we live in illiterate times and that's depressing" and "I've read this many!"

That second response infuriates me. First, it's narcissistic and self-centered. It privileges the social class that has the time and energy to read these books by assuming that the list is definitive and applicable for everyone, everywhere else. They decide what is on that list. Mastery of it constitutes literacy. They ignore other forms of the written word, whether in newspapers, ads or printed on the internet.

What makes someone literate is how deeply they can read into the material, not how far they've gotten on some viral reading list, using the BBC’s coattails as a shield. Reading half or none of these books at age 22 (or 88) doesn't make you literate. It just shows you different ways to use language. Put me in a Staten Island high school and (if I’m lucky) I might recognize half of what's being said or expressed. The language of “Pride and Prejudice” isn't going to help me there. For that matter, neither will “Dune” by Frank Herbert.

Language is about expressing yourself with the written word regardless of what form you choose. All of the BBC’s books will help you, but what will help you more is knowing what to use and where and how to make connections between people and ideas that would otherwise remain distant from each other, lessons which doesn’t have to come from that list.

That experience and that knowledge doesn’t have to come from books. Illiteracy isn’t when people aren’t reading classics. Illiteracy is when people aren’t reading at all.

About That Watchmen Movie...

2009-03-08T18:54:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed the Watchmen movie. I had a lot of fun watching it as well. That's it. I feel that's all I can say with certainty.

Everything else is my opinion and interpretation.

But, let's talk about it. This will have spoilers throughout it, but I don't mean them to break anyone's non-knowledge of the movie for the purposes of being a douchebag.

Wait, what? Zach actually posted? Do you know how long I've been bugging him about this? And....he's wrong. It's been eleven months since he posted something native to Eleven Names. But shhhhhh. That's between you and me.

It's good to have him back.

The movie he missed last night was Watchmen. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as a movie. I enjoyed it as a distillation of the graphic novel, I think. Make no mistake, this movie is worth your money, I believe. I personally paid $7.50 for it, though that may roughly double depending on where you live.

The change at the end...in retrospect doesn't feel so bad. Oh, don't worry. All the people that were supposed to die still did. (Rorschach is still dead by the credits, even if Jon (Dr. Manhattan) did him the final grace of having his blood explode and land on the snow as his symbol.) The difference (in the non-alien ending and New York not becoming Tentacle Town, as a friend of Eleven Names put it) is from where the destruction comes, which I guess, is a point of contention.

I'm not sure how to interpret that change. Am I supposed to see the lack of non-human lifeform as something anathema to the book's message? That the threat posed to earth by Ozymandias' machinations was not one that could be pointed to a terrestrial source? That the threat was Othered, uniting all of humanity, regardless of race, belief, sexuality and country against it? If so, then you'll be content.

For that matter, what is the message of the book? One friend of Eleven Names said that the movie sold out the book by portraying the characters as too likeable. It made them heroes at the end when they weren't supposed to be, which sold out the movie, he believes. I don't want to straw-man his argument.

(I think he reads this, so I'll respond to this here, and so to him, I say: if I neglected an important point of your argument, let me know and I'll edit this accordingly!)

He said the point of the movie was that the protagonists weren't heroes and to portray them as such, to airbrush their unenviable traits, (Silk Spectre II wasn't whiny enough, Rorsarch wasn't obviously insane enough, etc.) was to sell out the message of the book, which was these people aren't heroes. He believes that the movie made Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II into heroes because they went along with the lie and are going back to small-time superheroics.

I believe he's wrong. I haven't read Watchmen carefully yet. It's a huge book. I've read it two or three times, but not carefully, so I can't tell if Silk Spectre II should have been more whiny, but I'm fairly sure the book had many meanings, and many messages to bring to the reader. When we spoke, he seemed adamant to say the story was about heroes. What should be, what they are, etc. I'm not sure it's right to say the book was about one thing, above a bunch of other ones. Was it about how close humanity was/is to nuclear annihilation and what it would take to make humans back off that ledge of holocaust?

Is the film about our collective hubris to let large world powers steadily decline into a place where they feel nuclear attacks are the only option and what would save us or is it just about heroes?

I think it's about all of that and more I can't wrap my head around or understand because I haven't read it carefully. Saying the movie has a singular meaning above all the other ones is something I think I can reasonably I disagree with.

There was one part that didn't sit quite right to me, above a lot of others that didn't as well.

It's not a spoiler if you've read the book, but in the end, Jon, (Dr. Manhattan, a.k.a. Tiny God, LLC), sees Silk Spectre II and Dan (Nite Owl II) naked, obviously having finished sex, asleep. He smiles, in what I take to be content and joy, then walks up to Ozymandias, who has a very "human to God" conversation, in which Jon says he doesn't know what's going to happen, but he knows that it's going to continue and it's not over. He then says he's going to create some life somewhere else.

In the movie, he kisses Silk Spectre II once more before he goes off to create life and he doesn't say that to Ozymandias, he says it to Silk Spectre II before the kiss. And I'm not sure how to interpret that change. Am I supposed to be angry because Jon, in the book, was supposed to finally have accepted his godhood and detachment from the mortal coil and it is shown through the smile and not interrupting the budding romance between Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II to say goodbye or anything, and in the movie he goes for a final kiss to the woman whom he tried to love, possibly ruining that interpretation of events?

I was already in Mr. Snyder's corner and so it shouldn't be surprising that I interpret Watchmen to be very faithful to the book, to its possible detriment as a movie with enough fanboy moments to reassure me that Mr. Snyder is dead serious about paying respect with little bits of love weaved into every scene.

Perhaps the movie is too long for Joe Popcorn, as the Onion's A.V. Club mused, but for me it was a little short. An HBO miniseries sounds like a good idea, but Watchmen is simply too expensive to pull off as anything but a huge Hollywood blockbuster, according to the director. The action scenes are exciting and in a moment of sheer generic masculine excitement, fucking awesome! For some people, that might ruin the movie, but I don't think I could stand a movie that was all exposition and dialogue without something easier to digest to break it up.

Even using the phrase easier to digest sets off warning bells in some people and they're right to be concerned. Watchmen is not something that's easy to digest as a whole, but there are individual portions that go down easier than others, and when viewed from that perspective, those slow-motion action sequences make more sense in the context of the movie.

The Watchmen movie still has to be a movie, and I'm not going to lie, without those action scenes, I would have been looking at my pocketwatch a lot more, which is not something you want to happen in a movie. Different artists make some changes to original material for their interpretations. The example that works best in my mind is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, originally written by Nine Inch Nails.

If you're a fan of the book, your own prejudices, reasonably cultivated, I believe, are going to inform your opinion more than any review or perspective I can give you, so I'll say this:

I view the point of the Watchmen, the book, to be to leave the reader with more questions than answers by a long shot. Some of those questions are centered around heroes. Other questions are centered around other considerations. I feel that the movie left me with more questions than answers about the nature of heroes, who they are, the extent of an all-encompassing personal moral compass and how close the world is to its own demise by people who won't compromise their position, regardless of whether they're in a beat-up raincoat, the Presidency or the Kremlin. From my perspective, Zack Snyder and everyone involved with the adaption succeeded.

I enjoy the movie and I recommend it to you, whether you've read the book or not.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Rorschach is bad ass.

An Accumulation of Albatrosses

2009-03-07T05:41:00.007-05:00

It has come to my attention that it may be possible to carry this shambling persona, this self-indulgent, measured engagement, or lack thereof, with the world too far--that there may be responsibilities I am not addressing, opportunities that are lost as I lay in a pile of my own filth, gazing at my navel. (Or worse yet, reading online forum threads about videogames.)

These things have always gone in cycles, for me, and perhaps it is time to begin a new one. In short, I have decided, with no small amount of prompting from the world and my friends, that it is probably time to wake up.

There are a million things I have not told you about. Love, second-hand death, the rising tide of madness and a car crash, to name a few. It has been a year and a day since my last post produced exclusively for this blog. I know because my good friends called me on it at the bar. There have been things that I tried to tell to you, and could not bring myself to complete. Eventually, the weight of unwritten words around my neck made it difficult to even look at the website, let alone type anything.

That was a nonsensical, self-indulgent sentence, summarizing a nonsensical, self-indulgent state of affairs that has, I believe, ended.

Tonight, I have missed a movie, driven the back roads, shot pool, been thanked by a bartender and spoken words of truth and import with dear friends. I promised that I would do something, not something specific but something nonetheless, and I intend to keep that promise. I have been letting failures, or at least mismanagements and projects that drag on and on, accumulate and weigh me down, leaving the things I care about to rot in the field. It just won't do.

If you're reading this, thank you for giving our confused little website your time. Thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent nonsense, and my arrogance, and my ambitions. And thank you for putting up with my absences, all too frequent.

It is a much easier thing to read than to write, to think than to speak, and to sleep than to learn. (Which is not to say I have slept well lately, on the whole.) The world around us is ever fascinating, perhaps now more than ever, and it is so much easier for me to watch it go by than to act, even in the tiniest of ways.

But it is only through acting on the world that I can truly understand it, and myself. And perhaps I have some responsibility, both to understand and to act on that understanding.

So.

Hello, internet! It's been a long time. I think I am going to begin to write to you again. James is still here, as is my good friend the Gentlebeast, and Thom, and perhaps others will be drummed up as things begin, again, to roll.

Thank you, as always, for your time. I hope to be stealing more of it soon.

Demos: The Hand That Feeds

2009-02-25T11:02:00.003-05:00

I know using a Nine Inch Nails song is passe on the internet, but I'm listening to a stripped down remix of the song, in which there is a light, ambient noise and piano as Mr. Reznor's only accompaniment. (Plus, With_Teeth wasn't good anyway.) There's also a bit of overlap. This one is about John McCain and who was feeding him when and with what.

I respect the man's service in uniform. I just hope he stops keeping the Republican party line, the one that ruined and tarred him with divisive and insulting race-baiting politics not to mention tying Sarah Palin to his ticket and political fortune. Like most other soldiers that Bush commanded, he also was used and led to ruin. It's just more clearly visible here.

If this inspires you to do anything, I hope it inspires you to look up more information on PTSD treatment for Iraq War veterans, because when they get home, they're going to find a host of problems (mental and emotional) waiting for them on this shore.

And that's assuming they can get a job.

There's something that rubbed me very wrong about Senator John McCain's comment about the $800 billion taxpayer bailout, which he called generational theft.

It's a poor choice of words. Admittedly, it's politics as usual—using overly emotional language to discuss something that is as serious as a heart attack and requires careful attention, which a shot to the gut (of which that imagery strikes) doesn't help.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Republican plan of 60% tax cuts versus 40% spending is the wrong way to go. Over the last eight years, we've had quite a few tax cuts and they haven't gotten us very far. I'm in favor of spending a lot of money, but it has to be directed not to one and done jobs (à la construction, see Japan in the 90s) but to industries that have a clear, long term sustainable trajectory.

What McCain means, I believe, is that the money was borrowed from future generations, for us and others to pay back. Which, while accurate, is incredibly callous. It's callous because the resources of my generation have already been plundered, and will never be repaid. That was when all those brave senators stood up and voted to authorize war in Iraq. McCain didn't seem to mind "generational theft" when it was his hand in the cookie jar of my youth.

McCain voted to send people my age out to fight a war when he didn't even bother to read the full 90 page NIE report about Iraq. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war over weapons of mass destruction, a particular point where the U.S.A. hadn't had human intelligence sources for five years. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war when the evidence presented to the Armed Services Committee were blurry pictures of trailers in the desert.

In 2007, when McCain was in Iraq, he said that (based on a visit to the Shorja Market in Baghdad) Baghdad was very safe. And he was right.

Shorja Market was safe because there were 100 troops on the ground and on rooftops in that market. Shorja Market was safe because three Blackhawk and two Apache attack helicopters were circling overhead. He was safe because he didn't remove his bulletproof vest. Traffic was redirected and restricted for that hour-long visit. He went out to visit the production he voted in favor of and found an orchestrated calm.

McCain may want to think more carefully about what he is implying.

When Bush and his water carriers in the Senate and House authorized a war on the other side of the world under false pretenses, it was vital to American national security that it shouldn't be questioned. McCain saw no generation theft there. But when it's an $800 billion spending bill proposed by a Democrat, that's when he draws the line.

We know where McCain stands now that he's away from President Bush. Even though Bush is out of office, it's still too close for my comfort ideologically. I've always felt Senator McCain's political career in this decade has had a tragic quality, and it's no more apparent than here. Quite a few people, myself included, respected him before 2004 because of his ability to speak to more than a traditional base. (Dare I say maverick?) But with the phrase generational theft, McCain continues his slide into a familiar, anonymous role: Republican senator keeping the party line.

And these statements sound as though he's listening to the same people who had a cruel hand in his losing presidential run. The great tragedies end when the protagonists are ruined. After the fiasco that was the post-Palin campaign, McCain isn't looking too good, but I don't want to see his curtain close yet.

The Floor

2009-02-23T23:46:00.004-05:00

Hope. The hope in everyone's heart recently has been palpable. Not the wish-kind of hope evoked by dreamers (I hope I win the lottery), or the sappy-kind of hope (hope will carry us through) but rather a third kind of hope: the sickly kind of hope that counts on hitting the floor. How far can we fall?

I am sure you all remember the graphs that started around six months ago, the ones that occupied the front pages of - hmmm - every newspaper nation wide. Those graphs sported captions that read something like: 'Don't count on a job, the future is scary, and nobody likes living anymore.' In case you were wondering, that was not the floor.

Roller coasters are used for many metaphors and similes to describe uncertain and tumultuous times. In many ways, this comparison is cliched, but it is also so fitting in this situation that it transcends a silly cultural construction and actually becomes a viable means of expression. So, bear with me as I explain what a roller coaster does. First, a roller coaster takes a car uphill at a nearly impossible angle for a long period of time. Everyone on board the roller coaster is well aware, what with the passing trees, then clouds, that they are clearly gaining a great deal of altitude, and, seeing how the cars are unable to fly, should be concerned about this course of action. Still, up is up, and flying never hurt anyone. So everyone on board surrenders their destiny to the tracks and enjoys this improbable accent. Then, at some point the tracks level off. On a really long roller coaster, being in the front is a very interesting experience, because you get to see the impending drop, but because the bulk of the coaster is still topping the hill, you might not get going fast until you are already part of the way down the hill. But even for those who do not get to see the drop before they feel it, they should know it was coming because of both the impossible angle of accent and the screaming of those in front of them. Roller coasters thrill, but should never surprise.

So we go through an election. I am excited. Like a kid in line for a roller coaster. Maybe change will happen. I like change. Do you know what else I like? Debt - not up to my ears, but 20 or 30 feet past my ears. Do you know who hates Republicans? Maybe me. I hate corporations and people that have too much money. I hate bail-outs. I hate waste. I hate war. I hate death. I hate incompetence. I hate lies. I REALLY hate bail-outs. So, when I find out that our very own change loving President is not only backing but PUSHING 'Bailout: the Second Coming,' I start to wonder if it really is Republicans I hate. Suddenly I realize how little effect what the people want has on the government, and I am reminded of what it feels like to be disenfranchised again.

Hope. The hope of a floor is keeping our hearts still as our bodies fall. Those graphs are not going away. They are thrilling, but they are not surprising. Screaming, the passengers reach the bottom of the hill. In the future, they see something brilliant and shining: a great angled incline: Progress: Change: Humanity: Hope. As their stomachs sink farther than the floor, pushed down inside them, they gasp, not out of despair, but for ecstasy. A hill is on the horizon. The track is laid. Salvation will come from above. All plans are good plans. All directions lead up. We will not lose, because we cannot lose.

We have not lost. Hope: the tracks are now good, because the conductor has changed. This conductor will drive our train safely. This conductor will bring our troops home: he will not stay the course. This conductor will keep the lobbyists and crooks out of Washington and the Whitehouse. This conductor drives a train. Trains don't go too fast, or down hills, or crash, or disappoint. Trains are safe for America. Roller coasters are a Republican thing. I am glad we are safe.

I am glad we have not lost. Hope is the floor when we have no floor. I do not trust myself - that is why governments and corporations should run the engine. How about we vote and feel proud once every four years. Why in that one shining moment of freedom do we not vote for who we really want? It is certainly not McCain, but truthfully, for all of the hope he inspires, it is not Obama either. The people want someone else. They don't want President Politician. They don't want President Oil. They want President Me. They want the thing they fear the most: to loose the tracks and finally be responsible for something. They want to destroy the destiny complex of America. They want to vote every Friday, and they want it to matter. They don't want to vote for flesh, they want to vote for ideas, like hope and change. They want to kick the shit out of legislation that pisses them off. They don't want pay raises for politicians when the people are unemployed. They don't want stimulus that will bankrupt their children. They want something else. The floor fell once.

Hope is the second floor. Hope might just be an unwillingness to fear. What will happen when the second floor falls? Will we still hope for an infinite incline to heaven, or will we decide to act here in the mud. I guess there is a chance everything will be better. Maybe a cure will arrive. Maybe we will all be saved from responsibility by destiny and government.

Or, maybe we will lose. Hope.

For Meadville, From Addiction

2009-02-21T18:50:00.001-05:00

The title is from Thoughts of Ionesco's final record, For Detroit, From Addiction, which is a monster of a disc. When I say I doubt you'd like it, I am dead serious. The band, a hardcore punk/free jazz trio, is something of an acquired taste, but if you like it, means you can see twenty or thirty years in the musical future or there is something very wrong with you.

When listening to the record, I get impulses to lick the dirty side of a broken mirror.

When writing something with that title and feeling in my mind, it needs to be something real. It needs to be something incredibly personal. But it also needs to be something wrong. Twisted. To do justice to the title, it needs to lay me bare. It's not enough to have my heart on my sleeve. It needs to open up my chest cavity and show you how my heart beats and how the emotional drugs I take to stave off my fears, anxieties and demons affect that pulsing, throbbing organ and coalesce with my bloodstream.

I want you to see a tourniquet. I want to you to feel the back of my throat, rubbed raw by screaming these mad dogs of glory at a multi-hundred thousand dollar baseball field in six inches of snow in the dead of 12:45 a.m. Monday because I ~~can't~~ won't call up a girl and tell her how I feel. I want you to see the vomit in black and white as I did on the way back to my apartment.

I want you to taste the disdain and love in my mouth when I sit at the group table in the Campus Center listening to people I don't think understand what they're talking about talk about politics. I love these kids, but I think they're incorrect.

God, I'm an asshole when I haven't eaten.

But now that I've eaten, I feel better.

It's 3 a.m. Wednesday and I'm not sure what to write. My emotional state doesn't so much cycle out of control as spasm and I roll with it. 4 a.m. now. Read about comic books on wikipedia. I can't do homework like this and I have a 6 page paper on medical ethics, as well as an oral presentation tomorrow. February is cruel, as always. (It is a month with long, barbed knives.) I can do it (it being vaguely described as homework or survive, but for the purposes of this sentence, it's homework), but the motivation does not exist to push it through. And in all this, I like a girl, but I am intimately aware that I have little to offer her, currently.

Let us review my current mental state: Neurotic, emotionally unstable, insecure. Oh, I feel like a winner. Throw in the fact that I am beginning to distrust, hugely, one of my best friends over the last three years ("What am I to you?" ringing in my head and "I do not consent" written all over my left arm, with bloody underlines) and I'm about ready to call in sick for a week just to get my brain back in order. But, if I know anything it's that I don't really work as a lone knower, so meditating on my problems only goes so far.

Hello, readers. I promise I am not crazy. I am brilliant, so I hear. But, I cannot be trusted. I am in front of you, currently, at my most depressed, fearful and dark. Literally, there are not lights on in my room except for the computer screen right now. Even Zach has long since gone offline, meaning that he's either playing videogames or sleeping. I should get on that second part.

I am looking for physical contact in the wrong places and I am coming dangerously close to pushing away a good friend in my intense desire for a hug from a girl who is single. This has lead me to huge, huge emotional trouble in the past. Speaking of which.

It is now Thursday evening/Friday morning. Putting this on the internet makes me anxious, as does just about everything else in my life. I am scared. This fear is capitalized on by the reminders of my own failures and just how brittle I am. I have been taken advantage of by people I have trusted emotionally to the point where it just seems to be a sad fact of my romantic life. I will stand up for the rights of the less fashionable populations in college but I wouldn't stand up for myself until late 2008 in a romantic relationship. Twenty one years, I've been letting things happen to me.

Last Saturday, I finally did something that didn't feel like I was being used.

Let me start at the climax.

I kissed a boy and meant it. It had nothing, repeat, nothing to do with making girls around either of us excited. I did it in secret. I put my hands on his chest and waist and held him close to me while we kissed. It felt like finally acknowledging and claiming the feelings that had been festering inside me for a good decade.

Thoughts I had nearly decade ago riding along, going east, looking out the window of my car, were welcomed back with open arms. I was scared then. I probably thought about it for that entire weekend. Now, it just is.

It was a relief and a rush of positive reinforcement all at the same time. I wanted to inaugurate these feelings. The group that I'm a part of and spoke about on Valentines Day, makes a lot of homosexual innuendo but is, by and large, very straight. Going beyond that comfort level is a stretch. It's scary, and this is an accepting group. I used to date a girl from that group. She used to mention, often, loudly, about how "if another one of her ex-boyfriends goes gay, she's giving up". I am very cognizant of being "another" ex-boyfriend of a girl that's deviated from being straight, but in those series of kisses, those thoughts were banished from my head.

Hours later, I would walk down an adjacent hallway and begin to be scared about being banished to hell for what I did, even though everyone's clothes stayed on, but in those moments between kissing a boy and walking back into Left 4 Dead or Elysium, I felt as though something, finally, had been lifted from my shoulders and I could begin to relax in my own skin.

These feelings are mine. These feelings are native to me. I do not have to worry about whether these thoughts and emotions are drummed up by a bunch of people for whom I am another mental or sexual conquest, being discarded and picked up again for my emotional utility or for my big head and soft body. My trust is like everyone else's, hard to gain and very easily lost. Strangely, I have a lot of faith in people, but I think that is a product of my inborn cynicism. (My faith in God is more of joke, in which His existence or mine is the grim punchline.)

After acknowledging my own feelings, what's left? I've kissed a boy. How hard can calling a girl be? I am more confident in all this, but I am still frightened. Presuming I can even get her to talk with me late at night in person, what happens when or if she finds this? What if anything, really. I'm left with the four sentences below, and trying to deconstruct and interpret them in something that resembles an answer.

I am going to hell.
I am straight up crazy and also brilliant.
I am scared.
I am all of this and more.

Let me end where I was Thursday night/Friday morning.

I am still in my room. The lights are on, and I am talking to the girl I want to call. It is about Latin American history and the revolutions therein. I am making her laugh (when in doubt, say the CIA did it) and that is enough for tonight. My copies of Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights have arrived today and I might install them before I go to bed tonight.

Saturday:
I still have not installed those games. Perhaps I will tonight between a homemade Indian dinner and videogames. In terms of odd things to end on, after feeling like I was going to vomit in the bathroom stall yesterday, a group of drunk kids came in and just partied down and I...just listened and laughed. What else could be done? We talked and laughed, at once separated by a barrier, but united in the acknowledgment that they were in fact, drunk.

After that, I no longer needed to vomit. It's those moments that keep me going. The social absurdities which remind me, sometimes, I can only laugh and recognize how strangely invigorating the humor is. I could use a little more of it.

Finished Demos: I Am Just Waiting In a Room

2009-02-14T17:46:00.001-05:00

Edit: Sometimes I'm completely wrong. I am just waiting in a room comes from the A Wilhelm Scream song "the Horse", which itself, echoes Fugazi's Waiting Room, in terms of lyrical content. The character in Fugazi's Waiting Room is patient, waiting for his moment. Function is the key inside Fugazi's waiting room.

I've always thought of this as an Eleven Names post, but it just had to go through the school newspaper first. Here, then is an expanded version of my latest column. It's about knowing when to leave and who to leave the group to.

Happy Valentines Day. For some of us, it's good. For some, it's not good. I will have a significant other on some Valentines Days and I won't on others. From this perspective, Hallmark and Hershey's fingerprints on the holiday seem far more tolerable. If you must call it Singles Awareness Day, go for it. There's a girl I ought to kiss tonight, but never will, despite the fact that I have her phone number and instant messenger handle. Sigh. Beyond all that, I went to bed at 7 a.m. last night, flushed after finishing a bottle of Absolut Vodka with a group of friends, just talking and playing videogames. I would have never seen or expected that kind of a wonderful night/morning the night before I arrived on campus in 2005.

Maybe four years ago, the night before I arrived on campus, I lay on a hotel bed somewhere in Northwest PA, staring at the ceiling, wondering what my first day would be like. I wanted then to find a group of people that I could relate to and grow with. What I found was not at all what I expected. I was initially disappointed. Shit, I've played so much Dungeons and Dragons it's wonderful and disgusting. Never thought I'd do that. I initially resisted. Now, I look forward to those roleplaying times. In this group, I've found (and hopefully) help found a place where conversations, stomach turning, high minded and honest can happen. I've found that and help keep that group going.

The title is a line from Fugazi's song Waiting Room. If you don't know it, then learn. In a manner like Fugazi, four years ago, in 2005, I was also waiting in a room for the next part of my life to begin.

So. This isn't my goodbye to the group. That will come in a couple months, and even typing that phrase sends shivers down my body. But it's my, it's your's now lecture. Just go for it.

I'm far too cynical.

As many of you have guessed, I am a member of the social group. I'm also a second semester senior and, in theory, know when it's time to go. Parents and recent grads tell me that if the college has done a good job you'll want to get out. And I do. I want to leave and achieve things. I'm reasonably scared but there's also something less fashionable to admit: I hope I can bow out gracefully and acknowledge that my time has come and gone.

This occurred to me when I realized I was being unbearably haughty to a new kid who wanted to join the cluster of overlapping Venn diagrams that is my extended social circle. He's excited about the possibilities of the social group and the fact that it is not like where he came from.

My friend and I chastised him for being so excited.

I'll repeat that: I chastised him for being excited. Seriously. That was ridiculous. I mean, sure, it was kind of to be expected, both my friend had graduated last year and I'm hopefully on my way out in May and we were on our way to Wal-Mart, which we all understand is something that is kind of evil. But in retrospect, it just seems silly. I was more awkward than I currently am once and not giving him the benefit of the doubt is disappointing to me personally. I didn't want that to happen to me when I was young and a freshman and now I'm keeping the process going? Bad James.

Having lived in the group for a good six or seven semesters of my tenure here, I'm no longer enthusiastic. I'm beaten down and have stories of trying to get a social group to move on something that's based on apathy and a healthy distance from more productive members of campus.

But him? He sees possibilities I dare not contemplate because I believe I know what is possible and what is out of the question. (ASG will not refund our money in a remotely timely fashion. I accept this.)

Oh, I've been there. I wanted to organize something. I was a part of another initiative that went for a couple months and then petered out. I can tell him that it won't work and to stop being so unbearably positive.

I can tell him this, but the truth is that the future of the group is for the juniors, sophomores and freshmen to mold as they see fit. I'm not needed—I've done my part. Now, I ought to enjoy the fruits of my labor, which (so far as I can tell) is being a thorn in the side of everyone trying to eat lunch in the Campus Center. But there's something else.

There's a larger and more inclusive community in the group than when I joined and that is the real reward. That's what I want out of college. I want a circle of friends. I want to grow. I want to leave in an almost mechanical cavalcade of good wishes and wistful memories. I want a diploma that says I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.

Soon, all that will be mine.

I've seen this club grow, and now isn't the time for me to be cynical or pessimistic. It's winter. Those emotions just get me in trouble and I'd like to spare the kids that set of experiences. The future, if I can use Joe Strummer's language, is unwritten. It will be their hands on the pen.

As part of a larger group of others, I have kept the pen safe and scribbled as best as I can on my future. This pen was handed down to me by other members, regardless of whether I agreed with what they wrote with it.

To those underclassmen I say, “Here take this pen. Write on the page of Allegheny, whether it's in the margins or over the letterhead. Oh...And write opinion columns. Please?"

Demos: The Impending Glory of American Adulthood

2009-02-09T13:13:00.006-05:00

The title is another Crime In Stereo song, off of their now-venerated 2006 record, the Troubled Stateside. Buy it now. The song is track three. Both the song and this piece are about the same emotion: Shit, I'm growing up.

These columns are starting to turn into letters to the community. I don't know whether it's just my pronounced anti-social tendencies (Seasonal Affect Disorder, how are you?) or that I’m getting better at writing.
Grant me your attention, if for a moment. I do feel as if I'm clinging to my sanity or good humor.
The current generation of games does not interest me. This isn't for reasons of quality, since 2008 was one of the best years for games in recent memory. I simply can't afford the new games and systems. I'm feeling more and more distant from the current gaming generation and the reasons, aside from revenue, aren't really fashionable. I'm getting older and have other equally expensive interests to cultivate as well as a limited amount of time to indulge them all.

Investing in new systems is maddening. The Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure and has a tiered pricing structure, which means if I don't want to play inventory management on my console, I have to buy an external hard drive (or pay extra). Plus, its new games cost $60. The Wii has yet to find a library of third party games that take advantage of the Wii remote and are actually worth playing. The PS3 (and the games on it) is still too expensive for my tastes and does not retain the PS2 backwards compatibility, which is where most of my games are.
I've yet to exhaust that library. Sitting by my television is a stack of about five or six stellar PS2 games (a later Burnout and Splinter Cell iteration and God Of War 2, among others) released in the last four years, each of which needs finishing or starting. I'm also tempted by the promise of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections for a whopping $30 total.

Like books, movies, TV shows and other media, there’s always something new and shiny. But there are three or four less shiny things that get left along the way. The trick, if videogames are to be a hobby that does not cripple you financially, is to stay a couple years behind the cutting edge.

There are advantages to this for PC gaming—hopefully the bugs in the original games will have been fixed. The expansions on content will also usually come to you for free since the game is no longer current. It also means that on the console side the good games will have been removed from the chaff and will cost you half as much. It's because of these older games that I'm okay with becoming increasingly irrelevant in current videogame discourse. For reasons that make a sad logic to me, I am not much of a "gamer".

Gaming is an expensive hobby to stay up-to-date with. In some circles, it's only when I'm willing to pay a $350+ ante to play a $60 game that I am marked as a gamer. The disposable income exists to do that and buy one game, presuming I don't want to eat or enjoy anything else until the semester is over.
I'm keenly aware that I will not have as much time as I currently do later on, so five or six games will last me at least eighteen months. By then, the price will have gone down for the next generation systems and I'll have bought the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections.

As I get older, I'm beginning to wonder if the real question of videogames is not what you pick up and what you stay current with, but instead what you leave behind along the way. I view the trailing edge as the way to play videogames like one might pick flowers--slowly and with gusto. This only makes the scent sweeter in a world that moves quickly and without pity. Whether it's a chrysanthemum or a controller, I hope you'll pick one up.